Quickening, Volume 1

by Amy Lane

  They called my cell phone as we were walking back to the car.

  “Miss Cory Green?”

  I didn’t recognize the number—and that was a big red flag, because I knew everybody who called me on my phone.

  “Yes,” I said coolly. It wasn’t my real name, but that was a good thing with elvish magic. Bracken heard my tone and perked up his long pointy ears. Everybody else saw his body language, and in a heartbeat I was surrounded by people sheltering me both from listening ears and prying eyes. “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “This is Iris Masterson from Judge Griffith’s office. One of your aides gave us a card?”

  The number they saw depended on whom they wanted to contact. They had deliberately set out to contact a subordinate. This was an attempt to either circumvent him or intimidate me. Good luck.

  “Yes, Ms. Masterson. We’d like to meet with Judge Griffith when it’s convenient.” I’d been going to say “At the soonest opportunity,” but I realized we’d actually won the last battle. The bigger the victory, the sooner it would be convenient for them to meet.

  “Today would be convenient, although I realize it’s late in the day,” she said smoothly.

  Ooh—here was a chance to be a dick without actually putting myself out to do it. “I’m sorry, we’re taking care of business down in Sacramento at the moment. I can meet with Judge Griffith tomorrow, after lunch, perhaps?” Because I probably couldn’t get out of bed before that.

  “Yes, of course. However, we do need to meet with Mr. Green, and not just his—”

  “I speak for Mr. Green,” I said, getting a mental reinforcement from Green inside my head. “Believe me, when you are dealing with me, you are dealing with all the power at Mr. Green’s disposal.”

  And then some.

  “Excellent,” she said, her voice still wary. “Then simply go up to the third floor of the courthouse and give your name to the receptionist. We expect this meeting to be very private—”

  “I’ll have two aides with me,” I said grimly, thinking Bracken and Teague. “I won’t hold a meeting without them.”

  “We expect complete confidentiality—”

  “What I know, Green knows. What Green knows, they know. It’s that simple.”

  There was a sound of frustration on the other end, but I’ll give it to her. Iris Masterson could do cool with the best of them.

  “Of course. I look forward to meeting you.”

  “Of course.”

  We’d reached the SUV by this time, and I hung up and leaned my head limply against the window.

  “That was terrifying,” I said randomly. I’d heard it—I’d heard the implicit threat, the shielded power. I wasn’t sure if Iris was our elf bitch, but she was definitely up in the food chain, and she had really wanted to meet Green alone.

  Well, maybe it was my loss. Alone, I could have killed her without witnesses.

  Bracken dropped a kiss on my head. “Me and Teague?”

  “You betcha.”

  “Good. I want to see Teague in a suit.”

  I grinned weakly at him. “I want to see you in a suit.”

  His grin was much stronger—and much less afraid—than mine. “Backatcha.”

  I was exhausted but pretty sure I wouldn’t sleep up the hill.

  Of course my first order of business was to chase down Green. I flew through the living room and up the granite staircase to the trapdoor, homing in on his presence. He was feeling especially serene today, which I liked, but it wasn’t until I burst into the Goddess grove that….

  Oh, hell.

  I was destined to live my life in one big state of surprise.

  “Green?”

  He stood cool in a linen suit, which meant he must have met with someone today and probably initiated the meeting. But it wasn’t the suit, or the paperback at his side, that caught my attention.

  “Beloved?” he responded, his voice infused with such joy I caught my breath.

  The two men—men?—behind him heard his voice and smiled.

  “Green, we have angels in our garden.”

  They were tall—the sober ginger-headed one taller than the flirty blond one—and their wings stretched behind them in an aura of violet and golden feathers.

  “They’re a gift of sorts,” Green said, smiling at them with shining eyes.

  “We bear a gift,” the blond one said earnestly. “Shep, you want to—”

  But Shep was already venturing near me, his hand outstretched.

  “Here,” he said, placing his palm against my cheek. “Adrian sends his greetings.”

  I swallowed hard against the lump in my throat.

  “Green?”

  “Yes,” he said, affirming what I could barely stand to believe.

  “Adrian sent us angels.”

  “Yes,” he said, sliding his arm around my waist. “Yes, he did.”

  I swallowed hard again and closed my eyes, but when I opened them, the angels didn’t go away.

  As signs went? As omens that maybe things were getting dire, but they would be okay?

  Yeah.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “Shep—”

  “Shepherd,” the somber one intoned. “And this is Jefischa.”

  “Jefi!” Jefischa said brightly.

  “Thank you.” I clung tightly to Shepherd’s hand against my cheek and let Adrian’s love bless me and the growing beings in my body.

  Bracken: Not really elves with wings

  “LOOKS GOOD on you, mate,” Green said smartly, smoothing the shoulders of the linen suit jacket over my back.

  I grunted and eyed the two angels looking at me curiously from the corner of the living room. “Uhm….”

  “We have no sartorial preferences,” Shepherd said, but he was cocking his head and squinting as though taking notes. He was wearing linen slacks and a soft cotton T-shirt. His long, bare pink toes kept flexing and retracting in Green’s cream-colored carpet. Every time they clenched, he looked delighted, and every time they flexed, he looked surprised.

  “I’m not even sure how you got the T-shirt over the wings,” I said frankly.

  “It was awesome, wasn’t it, Shep? We just put them over our heads, and the wings just… just fit, and I was so worried, because….” He looked around at all of us with enormous—almost elven—gray eyes. Even Green, who wasn’t going on the run, was wearing denim cutoffs with no shirt. “I don’t think our old clothes can be worn here.”

  “What were your old clothes?” Cory asked from her perch on the back of the couch. She sat between Renny and Nicky, who were also staring at our new denizens with big excited eyes.

  “Robes,” Jefischa said promptly. “Except not really, because we didn’t really have bodies, but humans need a frame of reference, so we sort of draped, you know, pretend magic robes around our pretend magic bodies, and they changed colors along with our wings.”

  Their wings had maintained a passionate purple and bright optimistic gold since Green and Cory had escorted them down into the hill, where the wings made Green’s vast room look small.

  They’d been chilled, and hence the clothes, but Green had set the gnomes about weaving some of the trees on the outskirts of the Goddess grove into a shelter. Of course Shepherd and Jefischa were welcome in the hill, but in the week since they’d arrived, it appeared they were only comfortable indoors for brief periods of time.

  “So they’re really going to have the meeting this time?” Renny muttered, looking at me doubtfully.

  The morning of the original scheduled meeting—the morning after Shep and Jefi had apparently just appeared in the garden, according to Green very naked and very much “involved”—we’d been awakened rudely by the Cory Emergency Defense System that Cory had erected earlier in the summer.

  Mario, LaMark, and Nicky had been out flying, and they’d seen what appeared to be a pack of werewolves throwing themselves up against the shield that marked the edge of Green’s territory. It was only programmed to go up whe
n hostile forces tried to cross our borders.

  The vampires were asleep, and none of the werecreatures wanted to touch them. For a moment, we were afraid we were going to have to kill them again, the way we had in Monterey—just make the shield lethal and watch them die—but Cory had hovered on the top of the hill, wind whipping through her hair and T-shirt, and looked hesitantly over her shoulder at the two new arrivals watching her curiously.

  Then she’d called on Green, Arturo, Lambent, and me—and on some of the other sidhe who had given her loyalty and particular affection—and picked the werewolves up, en masse, in a big majestic glowing bubble of magic.

  That she’d promptly pitched over the trees and into Lake Clementine.

  They didn’t try to come back. Nicky, Mario, and LaMark had flown over the lake and watched a number of injured, shivering humans drag themselves out of the lake to lie on the banks and pant, completely done for the day.

  Well, yeah—they’d probably broken a number of bones and sustained quite a shock as well, so it only figured.

  Cory had barely touched down when Renny intercepted the phone call from Iris Masterson, asking smoothly for another week to prepare their meeting.

  In that time we’d sustained two more attacks, one of them while Cory and I were away at school. That one was more of a testing attack—the wolves were poking at every edge of the shield, trying to find a weakness. Arturo got canny then and asked Green if he could cast a simple sleep spell woven with Cory’s magic. Every time an enemy tried to breach the shield, it simply put the wolves to sleep. They’d wake up, punch the shield, fall asleep for an hour, wake up, punch the shield, and sleep would start all over. After about twelve hours, the wolves slunk away, and Arturo rescinded the sleep spell—mostly because we wanted to see what they’d do next.

  “It’s not as if they’ve made any progress!” Green said in a rare moment of exasperation.

  “Well, they have a little,” Cory pointed out. “They know that I’ll pitch them in the lake, Arturo will put them to sleep, and you’ll….” She trailed off and looked at him questioningly. “Seriously—what are your plans?”

  Green’s smile was tinged with a hint of sexual evil.

  The next day we woke up to the clanging of the shield, and everybody who could fly got treated to puzzled werewolves in the thrall of a very potent spell of lust. For a moment we watched in bemusement as the age-old game of seduce and dominate began to play out with every wolf who tried to broach the shield.

  It wasn’t until we saw the first mounting that Green flinched in horror.

  “Oh, hells,” he muttered.

  “Can you stop it?” Cory asked, staring in a sort of queasy fascination.

  Because we’d already figured out that most of the wolves on the ground were male. And there was only one place for the swollen wolf penis to go. And it’s not like wolves carried around packets of lubricant in their fur. And to top it off, there was that thing they did when the penis enlarged at the base and….

  Green didn’t want to stop the spell, because he was pretty sure the flip side to “fuck them all” was “kill them all,” and the round of yipping that set up around the shield was a punishment to all of us for his shortsightedness.

  Watching the bottom wolves limp away awkwardly was painful as well.

  We hovered for a few moments in horrified silence until Jefischa’s voice broke the stunned quiet.

  “That’s why there’s the little plastic bottles everywhere, Shepherd. How very convenient!”

  “Those, uhm, are supplied by Green’s people,” Shepherd replied, obviously embarrassed.

  “Which is nice,” Jefi replied philosophically, “but of no use at all to the sick werewolves.”

  Cory laughed so hard she almost fell out of the sky. She and Green managed to throw a padding of compressed air underneath her, and she bounced giddily like a kid in one of those bounce houses, sliding to the ground in a breathless puddle of squeals and horrified giggles.

  “That was a mistake,” Green admitted gamely as he touched down himself.

  “No, no,” Cory countered, calming herself down. “It was very creative, beloved. Very you. I don’t think you’d counted on the cruelty when you came up with that one.”

  Green grimaced. “Well, no. I mean, it’s my favorite state of being, yes?”

  She’d grinned and thrown her arms around his shoulders, and he’d held her—not carefree, no, but partners in ruling, in the way that made us all comfortable again.

  Of course we were not exactly comfortable with the damned alarm going off every other night, so when Iris called again, Cory jumped right on that bandwagon without hesitation.

  You’d almost think her enthusiasm for the meeting was because the werewolf attacks kept us too busy to answer her mother’s calls.

  That assumption was very probably right.

  But it didn’t change the fact that now, finally, after a week of not knowing when the lights and the siren and the “what to do with the damned werewolves when they attack” would happen, we were finally going to meet with the enemy face-to-face.

  My suit had been ready since the first day.

  Cory was wearing a stretchy poly/wool blend skirt that made room for her growing hips and stomach, and a nicely fitted—for now—top in emerald green. She’d obviously seen the wisdom of going with Green’s signature color, because we hadn’t heard a word of protest.

  In fact, the arrival of Shepherd and Jefischa—proof that Adrian really was at a place that defied imagination, especially for a vampire—seemed to have calmed down some of her restlessness.

  I have to say that the two of them were a serene, watchful presence out in the garden. I mean, I didn’t think we’d be making love out there again anytime soon, but then, given that Cory was starting to show at three months, I didn’t think she’d let us make love out here in a public venue anyway—not when her body wasn’t in a place of safety and comfort.

  It didn’t matter. Something had shifted in all of us with Adrian’s unexpected gift—some small weight in the balance of our belief.

  Optimism. Such a precious commodity. It could not be bought or sold, only borrowed or given.

  He had given us hope.

  Which was what would allow us to take this meeting in the lion’s den.

  I let Green finish straightening my suit and hair. Then, surprisingly, he made sure my cell phone was charged.

  “Don’t we have—?” I tapped my forehead.

  “Yes,” Green agreed, “but if there’s enough magic there to short that out, I want a backup system.”

  Cory looked at him skeptically, and he shrugged. “It’s an extra consideration, beloved. Very often when someone has to think about magic, they forget about electronics. When they think about electronics, they forget about magic. Either way, we can communicate, aye?”

  The lapse into archaic English was enough. “Yes, Green,” she said demurely.

  “Got it,” I said tersely.

  Teague held up his own phone and showed us the screen—fully charged, all business codes ready at the punch of a finger.

  We were good to go.

  Nicky would go with us and sit in the car as our getaway driver, and I liked that just fine. If things got bad, he could fly away, but if not?

  Having the car ready to go could save our lives.

  “Remember,” Green said soberly, “best-case scenario, this really is a talk, but given how many times they’ve tried to kill us—”

  Cory shook her head. “Best-case scenario, this is a trap we can get out of,” she said matter-of-factly. Her hands batted secretly under her blazer to check her shoulder holster. She had a permit to carry concealed, and so did Teague, so both of them were prepared for the metal detectors and screening process at the entrance of the courthouse—more than prepared, since they had silver shot as well. “Super-best-case scenario is that we manage to capture someone and bring them out with us.”

  I gaped at her. “We’ve been wa
iting for this meeting for weeks, and you’re just mentioning that now?”

  She shrugged. “Well, we’ve been talking about that, right? Capturing one and seeing if we could maybe not kill it. Remember? We want to see how far this supernatural element goes, so we can just break the… the blood compulsion and maybe not kill everybody.” Her wedding ring winked on her finger as she crossed her arms in front of her, and for a moment she looked every bit the commanding sidhe princess who could reassure a freaked-out captive.

  “Okay,” I said, looking up at Shep and Jefi again. Jefi had seen my many speculative looks throughout the week, and now he grinned.

  “Look, Shep—you were afraid we couldn’t help them once we were down on the earth, but we’re giving that one faith just by being here.”

  Cory looked at me, a small smile on her face. “Yeah?” she asked, her voice low and throbbing with affection.

  My face heated, and I looked down at my hands. “Angels,” I mumbled. “Even elves have heard the stories. And they chose to come here, when you needed them most.”

  She hopped off the couch, still graceful for all the slight rise in her belly, and walked to where I stood, tilting her face up with that sweet, open expression that she wore so rarely.

  “If elves are the children of the Goddess and the other,” she said, a little bit of mischief in her, “who do you think angels are the children of?”

  I looked at her, remembering our mythology and trying to put what I knew of elves and angels into the same book. Eventually I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  She shook her head too. “I don’t know either—but they’re not human, and they’re somebody’s children. Before they chose to be mortal, they looked to God. Maybe we should just have a little faith that it’s not all scary shit out to get us—including God. Maybe that’s all we have to know. It’s okay if it gives you faith, Bracken Brine. Did the same for me.”

  I nodded. “Not all scary shit,” I repeated.

  “Nope,” she said, then swallowed. “I’m telling you, it’s something I needed to hear.”

  I slid my hands along her upper arms and thought of how we were walking into a trap. “Me too.”